[ˈfɔːwədˌθɪŋkɪŋ]

Context determines Content…

Admitted, Google is a good knowledge-base… hmm, correction… it’s a freakin’ awesome knowledge base for us that grew up in the dark ages of the information society.
However, some times limitations of the current approach is encountered and one starts wondering when the great minds of our time get their act together and start finishing off the implementation of the standards constituting the semantic web, or Web 3.0 as its been cornered.

One such limitation came to me during my search for a profile picture of my great colleague and acquaintance James Kelway.
Executing a search in the Google image database yielded a somewhat spurious result…

As James himself explains it when I asked him WTF was going on with his online visual presence…

That is my great great grandad’s work. He cultivated new plants and named a few after himself and his family – immortalised! Funny the mix between IA and flowers!

…and he continues…

As an aside its a great example of context decides everything….how a computer sees the same thing because the metadata describes the pic. There is a link here but that is purely coincidental

I think this is an interesting (and funny) example of the limitations of the algorithms of the current indexing and information retrieval systems…